This project aims to make life easier for any iOS developer that has to translate her Apps into more than one language. Apple's genstrings tool is very dumb and sorts strings automatically by alphabet, I prefer to have them sorted by module they appear in to have a little more context.

Additionally I find it very annoying how Apple thinks localization of XIB files should work (File duplication? Really?), so I implemented a different kind of replacement method that does not need the XIB files to be duplicated or edited by some script that is not included in Xcode by default.

Extract localizable strings

Usage: python localisationextractor.py

Will scan all subdirectories in the current directory for *.m files and *.xib files to extract localizable strings. It may catch files lying around that don't belong to your project at all because it just does a recursive filesystem traversal. It does not read your *.xcodeproj.

Currently only NSLocalizedString(<string>, <comment>) strings are extracted from m-files. NSLocalizedStringFromTable and friends are ignored but will be added in the future.

Use in conjunction with L5er class to localize XIB files at run time without interface duplication.

Autotranslate XIB file strings

Usage:

1. Put your translated strings in your "Localizable.strings" file (you may use the localisationextractor.py script to get a untranslated file to base your strings file on)
2. Include L5er.h in your prefix.pch file
3. In - (void)viewDidLoad; call [self.view autotranslate];. The L5er class categories for UIView subclasses view will traverse the view hierarchy recursively and try to replace all strings it finds.

Currently supported UIView subclasses

• UIView: just traverses subviews
• UIButton
• UILabel
• UITextView
• UITabBar
• UIToolbar
• UISegmentedControl
• UINavigationBar

If you want to add autotranslate to your custom UIView subclasses just implement a -(void)autotranslate; method, it will be called automatically.

TODO

1. Write a script to merge existing Localizable.strings with newly extracted strings.
2. Make the python script accept commandline parameters.
3. Provide example project.